Sprint The Dream 2012

US Telecom company Sprint has created a cinema announcement for their "Dream” campaign, in order to motivate people to put their mobile phones to sleep during the movie. d3 was used to map, simulate and output content onto sculptural LED tunnels, that were filmed for the announcement.

Background

If your phone could truly “sleep,” what would it dream? A new interactive on-screen cinema experience created by Sprint in partnership with “Team Sprint” encourages moviegoers to turn off their mobile device in exchange for a custom mobile phone “dream”. More than 1,000 NCM Movie Theaters will show the experience on nearly 18,000 screens as part of Sprint’s courtesy-message sponsorship that asks moviegoers to turn off their phones prior to the start of a movie. Artisan, the new sister division of UK based design company United Visual Artists, was taken on board for the direction and production of this filmed announcement.

At the outset of the user’s movie theater experience, Sprint’s 40-second Public Service Announcement (PSA) gives people the chance to receive a personalized “Dream” on their mobile phone via text and the use of social media.
“Our mission was to create something that would take full advantage of the power and scale of a cinematic experience,” said Michael Boychuk, SVP, Executive Creative Director, Leo Burnett. "We challenged ourselves to shoot Dream without any computer-generated graphics and instead used a full-size art installation.”
Sprint’s cinema experience, Dream, will be available in NCM Movie Theaters until the end of 2012.

d3 Solution

Artisan used d3 to map all the video content onto two physical LED tunnels through which the film camera moved. With d3’s new Perspective Mapping feature in combination with tracking the camera, d3 virtually projected and re-mapped content from the point-of-view of the moving camera, in real-time. This allowed the content to appear as ‘hovering in 3D’ while being mapped onto the LED strips.

With a completely accurate real-time 3D preview inside d3 and the ability to pre-simulate all camera moves, the creative team could pre-sequence and map all content before going on-site. Using this unique approach, the client could sign off the content before seeing it on the physical video technology, and expensive and time-consuming content rendering on-site could be avoided.